Chapter Seven
Ben was two minutes early. I’d already been waiting on the porch for five. He drove super slowly down the laneway. Careful
driver? Points. Running into Ben at work or over the weekend was fun happenstance, but the intentional plans made me nervous.
Even if it wasn’t a date, it was hanging out with a stranger for several hours, not something I was particularly great at
unless we had some sort of objective or work-related task. Then I could be a great time. A lot of guys at work had said so,
like Elise is a great hang, but then they’d ask out the girls who made them nervous. I was rarely intimidating to men.
Ben got out of his truck and opened the passenger door for me. It was hard to climb into for a short girl like me, and I was
less than graceful, grateful that he was walking back around the truck to his side as I crawled up like a toddler. He gave
me the smile I was used to getting from actors—all instant charm. That was a little bit of a red flag.
That feeling didn’t subside for the first hour, either.
We spoke hesitantly. The charged, witty back and forth we’d had in our last few interactions felt like it had perhaps been a hallucination.
He spoke like he was answering questions at an audition, a little too rehearsed, as though he was pausing for expected laughter.
I defaulted to on-set writer voice—calm, in charge, but not revealing much.
After about ten minutes, we pulled up to a rustic little cabin with wide open garage doors in the middle of nowhere.
It was surrounded by plants and bushels of herbs and tomatoes.
We got out right next to a giant tomato statue.
“This is Vicki’s Veggies,” he said. “I thought we could pick some snacks.”
I wandered around inside the wooden shack, staring at all the lovely foodie items while he picked some tinned fish, a packet
of nut crackers, a basket of blueberries, and some local cheese, holding each item up, looking for my approval. Then he selected
two bottles of lemonade. He put some cash into a box and wrote down what he’d taken.
“The honour system? For real?”
“For real.”
“What stops thieves?”
“Little cameras, mostly, and they get absolutely roasted on the local Facebook group. Too much shame to endure.”
He pulled a basket out of the back of his truck, an old-timey picnic basket, and put everything in it. I ambled up, this time
with a tiny bit more finesse, but barely.
“You can just move here and open whatever business you want for tourists, eh?”
“My cousin literally sells jam out of a jam hut. She charges an astronomical amount for like, basic berry jellies and jams.
It has an Instagram account called Jessie’s Jelly Hut. She painted a big berry mural on the hut and tourists love to take
selfies in front of it.”
I pulled out my phone and showed him a photo of me, Marlon, and Katie standing in front of the giant strawberry mural.
“Oh, I might make fun of you for that.”
“Mocking my joy?”
He looked closer at the photo and expanded it so that he could really see my facial expression.
“Is that joy? I would say that’s a cringe, you have some gritted teeth.”
“Alright, alright, I was faking the joy. I had reached my extrovert max.”
“You’ll have to tell me whenever I’m bugging you then, OK? You know actors. I’ll talk forever if someone looks like they’re
listening.”
“Oh, I know actors,” I said
“I promise to try to be the least actor-y actor you know,” he said, turning the engine over. He selected a local country band
as our soundtrack.
“See? What actor would choose country? And not alt country but, like, real potential redneck simplicity.”
I made a face.
“I’m kidding. This is Emmylou Harris.”
“Sorry, I didn’t recognize it. I love Emmylou.”
“A writer who can admit they don’t know something. Radical!”
My heart was beating fast at our banter. I felt like we were playing a game of tennis and were well-matched. Then the silence
fell. I stared out at a cornfield, suddenly devoid of anything interesting to say.
After a few more beats of silence he said, “OK, OK, we can talk about work.”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
“Deal.”
After a few more beats, he admitted that not talking about work is hard.
“Acting is kind of the only thing that sets me apart out here, and also it’s, like, hard to think about anything else sometimes.
You have to want it so badly to get any work, it seems.”
“Same for the writing side. I’m actually trying hard to decentre work right now. But what makes you come back here? Most people
leave their hometowns and come back a few times a year when it’s a holiday.”
“I still love it? I like the pace of life. Living in both places is kind of the best of both worlds. When the city or work gets too hectic, it’s a great place to land.
Mostly, because of the space, the fresh air,” he said, pulling up to a parking lot in the middle of a bunch of trees.
When he killed the engine, it was very silent, almost eerie.
I could hear some waves crashing in the distance.
“Am I being kidnapped?”
“You are being taken, in a way, but I promise to return you safely with all your limbs.”
I followed him down a winding path that led us to a rocky beach. There was an overturned rowboat with chipped red paint on
the shore. He lay out a blanket.
“It’s just like Trinity Bellwoods Park only without the annoying hippies doing circus tricks or tiny dogs in giant purses
threatening to murder you.”
I tried to sit down with a modicum of poise and semi-succeeded. He arranged the snacks and handed me a napkin.
“I know it’s not crew hot dogs at ten in the morning but it will do, yeah?”
“It’s a great spread, you’re very kind,” I said, as I topped a cracker with some hard goat cheese and looked out at the water.
“This is very date-like. Like, if this were a date, I’d be giving you points for all of this, the well-thought-out picnic,
the view, the anecdotes about local lore and history.” I palmed another handful of blueberries. “And if it were a date, I’d
be worried about the ungraceful way I like to eat blueberries. But it’s not, so you get to see the real me.”
“You do have a piece of blueberry skin between your two front teeth.”
“I’m going to keep it there. You’re getting to know the real me, after all. I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t notice when stuff
is in her teeth until she takes a selfie of her left eyeball, worried she’s having some sort of stroke, and then notices some
olive between her teeth from lunch.”
“If I didn’t find you so hot, that might be off-putting, but right now it feels like a quirky specific character detail that makes me feel closer to you.”
“I overshare to bond, like any millennial.” I blushed.
I ate a few olives, more cheese, and some of the carrots and sugar peas Ben had packed from home in a bento box–shaped Tupperware.
Ben opened a tin of sardines and made a little assembly line on the picnic blanket of fish on crackers with an olive on top,
followed by a slip of basil leaf. He offered one to me before placing an entire cracker in his mouth. It felt calming to be
getting to know someone new with no objective, no internal worries about ruining a date or expectations. I was attracted to
him, but I felt no pressure. It was a new, freeing feeling.
“Is there a character you’d never play?”
“I don’t think so. I think there are some I’d find more difficult, or some I’d get tired of. Lately I’ve been either the love
interest or, oddly, the skeezeball.”
“Why oddly?”
“I don’t think I give off creep vibes, do I? Some actors have that face.” He ate the final sardine cracker, then dipped one
of the carrots into the herb-flecked olive oil in the near empty fish tin.
“You’re a fairly generic handsome white guy who can play eighteen to twenty-eight. That’s creeptown territory.”
“Touché. But generic?”
Was I negging him? Kind of.
“Alright, uniquely handsome, I’ll admit. That’s what the casting director said, actually.”
He grinned and mimicked my wolf-like approach to blueberry eating.
“See? If you eat everything the way you eat popcorn in a darkened theatre, it’s extra fun.”
“I get your point.” He grinned again. Even berry-skin teeth looked lovely on that flawless kind of face. There was still a boyish quality to it: his deep brown eyes and smooth, tanned skin. But he had the strong jaw and broad shoulders of a man.
“I suppose I’d love to play someone with depth, unlike me, to challenge myself. Everyone wants their own kind of Taxi Driver, right? But right now I’m happy that I’ve stopped playing Guy in Store Number Two and Creepy Friend with a Hat. Have you
ever wanted to act?”
“Hell no. I don’t even like having my photo taken. It took me years to be able to order in a restaurant without rehearsing
in my head first.” I finished my lemonade, turning it over to empty it out completely of any sugary drips and drabs before
putting it back in the basket.
We started packing up the food as we talked about acting.
“This was so lovely,” I said.
“Oh, this is just the beginning. I’m about to teach you a good county skill.”
“I don’t like to learn anything on my days off.”
He walked over to the boat.
“I am very bad at any and all sports,” I said weakly.
“Can you sit in a boat?”
I flashed on exactly what I did the last time I was in a boat on a lake a few hours north of here and blushed.
Ten minutes later I was in said rowboat holding a fishing lure and learning how to tie it onto a line. I was in one of my movies. Was this whole thing a dream? Ben was very competent at all things boat and lake. I provided the witty
commentary and occasional questions about boat safety and if we’d get drawn out to sea or eaten by a breed of freshwater sharks
I’d yet to learn about.
Ben’s arms tightened and he leaned over the side, excited. “I think I got one!” I said. “I don’t know about this. I like my
fish in tins and filleted by a nice man at the grocery store. Do you actually eat the fish you catch?”